Astronomy is the oldest science, and the sky is among our first laboratories. Long before the written word, people erected stone circles to frame the first dawn rays of the summer solstice, etched lunar calendars in bone and wove the planets into their myths. Eventually, we learned to measure the heavens, and in the 16th century the Copernican revolution rewrote our world’s place within them. But for all the long millennia that men of science had peered up at the heavens, it was a woman who would be the first to truly know the stars.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was just 25 years old when she discovered what stars are made